This Crazy, Hack-tastic Music Video Makes Your Mouse Cursor The Star

0

An indie band relying on crowd-sourcing is nothing new; many a tour bus has been paid for by way of things like Kickstarter or Indiegogo. But a band asking for your mouse cursor, instead of your money? Thats a new one.

Dutch rock band lightlight has tapped the power of the crowd along with a rather impressive hack to make what might be the cleverest* music video the world has ever seen.

Each time the video is played, they’re using a crafty bit of Javascript to capture the position of the viewer’s mouse cursor in real time. Throughout the video, the viewer back at home is encouraged to interact with the contents — drawing a smiley, keeping your cursor in a certain region, etc. Every 30-60 minutes, they re-release the video, now recomposed with the recordings of the most recent viewers.

You can check out the video for yourself right here. (NSFW Heads Up: There’s a fair amount of bare skin in the video, though it’s (usually) covered up by a few thousand mouse cursors. If cursor bikinis are grounds for a firin’ where you work, save this one for later.)

I dug around a bit, and it seems that the video/tech itself is the work of Dutch artist Roel Wouters and his studio, Moniker.

The video started making the rounds yesterday morning, but I held off in posting it in light of yesterday’s attack. Some twenty or so hours later it’s still rockin’ my world, so up goes the post! (If you’ve already seen it by now, a bit of a bonus for the second go-round: keep your eyes on your browser’s Javascript console [In Chrome that’s: View > Developer > Javascript Console] for an easter egg.)

[* “Cleverest” here not necessarily meaning “best”. Everyone knows that Jamiroquai’s Virtual Insanity is the best video of all time.]